How Vouchers Will Enrich Public Schools

This week, Washington's public schools got some very good news when Congress approved a plan to provide school vouchers to low-income families in the nation's capital. For critics, however, the fight against vouchers goes on. And they continue to repeat their mantra: vouchers drain money out of the public schools.

This argument is persuasive because it seems so obviously true. After all, vouchers do allow students and money to flow out of the public schools, and it would seem to follow that schools are worse off with fewer resources. End of story.

But like many obvious arguments, this one is thoroughly misleading. True, when students use vouchers to go to private schools, the vouchers' costs come out of the government's education budget. So if the total budget stays the same, there is less money available for the public schools. What the critics don't say, however, is that the schools also have fewer children to educate, and would receive the same money per child as before.

In fact, the public schools should actually come out ahead. In a typical voucher program, the cost of the voucher (say, $4,500) is far lower than the average amount the public schools spend on each student (say, $8,000). This means that when students go private, only part of the money budgeted for their education goes with them. The remainder stays in the government's pocket. If these savings were put back into the public schools, the schools would actually have more money per child. And the greater the number of students using vouchers, the greater the increase in spending per child could be.

Three cost considerations must be taken into account to complete the picture. First, it will cost the government something to administer the program; with proper design, however, these costs can be kept small.

In addition, some students would have gone private anyway, at no expense to the government, and their vouchers represent new costs. Few disadvantaged children fit into this category, though, so these costs can be kept low too.

Finally, were few children to go private on vouchers, the public schools couldn't cut back on teachers, buildings and other expenses — which become "fixed" costs — and they would be unable to realize the anticipated savings. But if hundreds or thousands of students were to leave — the Washington plan is for 2,000 students — the public schools could clearly cut back and save money. Fixed costs are not an issue when the voucher programs are sufficiently large.

So the bigger picture is essentially this. There are savings when students go to private schools. There are costs that subtract from the savings. And a voucher program can be designed to see that the savings more than cover the costs, with the residual put back into the public schools to increase per-child spending and leave schools financially better off.

The argument that vouchers drain money out of the public schools may sound like a high-minded defense of the public system. But in reality it's simple-minded, it isn't true and it provides no justification at all for denying needy children the educational opportunities that vouchers can offer.

Terry M. Moe is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford.

This argument is obviously true. But, good luck getting anyone who is already brainwashed to agree. I recall a lunch discussion with an alleged MENSA member and another individual who I consider to be one of the most intelligent persons that I know. At the end of the discussion, the only argument that they were left with, was that the government can not be trusted to adjust its fixed expenses. AAArrgh.

The chief opponents to vouchers are the teacher's unions and politicians beholden to their lobbyist. There is obviously a "conflict of interest" with respect to those who are chiefly opposed to them, plus those who have been brainwashed, mostly by the public schools themselves. One of the beauties of vouchers are they break this monopoly as well as what I would call the "secular religion" which permeates the public schools. There'll be many who'll argue that there is no such "religion", but if so, why does it have many of the same characteristics which define a religion (e.g. an ideology, a set of values which aren't embraced universally, etc.)

I think the next step should be allowing public funding to private schools including parochial. As long as such schools can meet certain accreditation requirements (e.g. I'm obviously not speaking about about schools preaching death to the infidels, or black's are racially inferior or superior etc.), why should the "separation of church and state" arguments be a continued impediment? The issue of getting prayer back into public schools is never going to happen, nor do I think it should. The beauty of voucher's, and one that public funding of private schools have in common with it, is that it makes an end-run around the "separation of church and state" argument; which cannot be said for the getting prayer back into public schools argument. An additional beauty of having a similar commonality is that vouchers have passed muster before the "Supreme Court."

I'm in favor of school vouchers, but I'm not entirely sure this is a winning argument. If parents were given the option of using vouchers to send children to private schools, and those private schools produced superior results at a fraction of the cost of public schools, how long do you think it would be before the electorate demanded a reduction in funding for the public schools? And in fact, why should public schools be permitted to provide education at almost double the cost of private schools?

. If parents were given the option of using vouchers to send children to private schools, and those private schools produced superior results at a fraction of the cost of public schools, how long do you think it would be before the electorate demanded a reduction in funding for the public schools?

Exactly why the teacher's unions are fighting so hard. They can't protect the bureaucrats and the incompetent without coercion.
The good teachers know this, too. They're not in any danger of being unemployed.

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